In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the use of portable bus devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers, for audio generation and processing. A user may desire to provide the generated or processed audio data to a host device, such as a laptop computer or a desktop computer, that includes a more powerful processor, a larger amount of memory, or a larger battery than the bus device. When physically connecting a bus device to a host device, it is inconvenient to do so with multiple cables and one or more adapters.
Currently, a bus device (e.g., a tablet, mobile phone or music player) that is compliant with one or more versions of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) specification may require multiple cables and one or more electronic signal adapters to transmit digital audio data to the host device that is also compliant with one or more versions of the USB specification (e.g., a laptop computer or a desktop computer).
Some car radio head units acting as the host device, require that bus devices include only a predetermined and limited set of configurations or capabilities in order to function properly. Therefore, if a configuration is altered, added to, or removed from a bus device, some legacy systems (e.g., host devices) may not function properly while interacting with the bus device.
Additionally, some bus devices are part of a technology ecosystem in which only interactions between devices authorized by the ecosystem may utilize the full functionality of both of the devices (bus and host).
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.